Page 46 of The Opening Act is Death (The Carnival of The Damned)

Forty Eight

Corvan - The Price of Escape

Running from the past means falling into the present and into her brutal kindness.

The air is cold and biting, thick with smoke and desperation.

I run through the winding corridors and shattered tents, heart pounding and not just from the chase, but the weight of everything I’m trying to leave behind me.

The Carnival’s shadow claws at me, whispering doubts and threats but I keep pushing forward, chasing a fleeting hope of freedom.

I don’t hear her footsteps until she is behind me, silent, unstoppable.

“Corvan,” her voice is low, sharp as a blade, but beneath it something fierce and unexpected. I falter, breath ragged, walls closing in.

“You can’t run,” she says, and there’s no pleading, only brutal truth.

When she catches me, it’s not with mercy.

It’s with hands that are harsh but sure gripping, dragging me back from the edge.

And in that fierce hold, I feel a kindness I never knew she had, a fierce, unyielding protectiveness that terrifies and grounds me all at once.

I want to fight, to break free. But instead, I let myself be caught.

Because sometimes survival means surrender to the queen of knives, and to the only person who might save me.

Cold bites through my skin as I dart through the winding tents and collapsing corridors.

The Carnival blurs around me, twisted shapes flickering in the smoke.

Every heartbeat screams to stop, to turn back.

But I can’t, not yet. The weight of secrets presses down like stones in my chest. Every shadow threatens to unravel the fragile hope I clutch, the hope that I can outrun the ghosts that haunt me.

Then footsteps, soft, precise, inevitable.

“Corvan.” Her voice cuts through the haze sharp and low, laced with that familiar edge that never truly leaves her.

I freeze, breath ragged, muscles tight as wire, no use hiding.

No use running. She moves with the lethal grace of the queen I once feared, now something else a fierce protector I didn’t know I needed.

Her hands catch me before I fall, steady and rough.

Gripping me with a strength that burns through my defenses.

“I’m not letting you go,” she says, voice raw with something I can’t name, something fierce and tender all at once.

I want to pull away, to scream, to fight but the walls are closing in, and in that moment, I understand sometimes survival means surrender.

Surrender to the fire, the pain, the woman who holds me like a lifeline in the dark.

She presses a blade’s edge to my skin, not to wound, but to remind me I’m still here, still alive.

“Stay,” she demands, “or everything you run from will catch you anyway.”

I nod, breath hitching. Because even broken, even bruised I know I belong here.

With her.